Once a key coral species providing the architectural framework for sprawling coral reef structures across the tropical western North Atlantic/Caribbean region, Acropora spp. coral populations have dramatically declined since the 1950s, and are now increasingly rare. Understanding the resilience and longevity of the remaining Acropora reefs in this area is critical to conservation efforts.

In order to test whether one of the largest populations of extant Acropora cervicornis in the western Caribbean was recently established (post-1980s) or a longer-lived, stable population, the authors collected 232 samples of premodern and recently dead A. cervicornis coral skeleton material across 3 sites at Coral Gardens Reef, Belize, using a subset of these samples for radiometric as well as high-precision uranium-thorium dating. Sample sites were chosen using a new genetic-aging technique to identify key sites and minimize damage to the living coral.

The data revealed coral samples ranging in age from 1910 (based on carbon dating) or 1915 (based on thorium dating) to at least November 2019; Greer and colleagues were also able to determine that Coral Gardens Reef has been home to consistent and sustained living A. cervicornis coral throughout the 1980s and up to at least 2019. While the authors cannot exclude the possibility of short gaps in the presence of A. cervicornis prior to 1980, the radiometric ages and continuous coral growth patterns found at the sample sites strongly suggests that Acropora coral has been growing and thriving at Coral Gardens for over 100 years.

Though the results from this study are not sufficient to determine exactly why this site seems to be a refuge for Acropora coral — Coral Gardens has been subject to the same increases in temperature and tropical storm/hurricane activity as reefs in the region with devastated coral populations, and the genetic diversity of Acropora is not unusually high — the findings here may be key to efforts to grow, preserve, conserve, and re-seed Caribbean reefs, as is identifying similar coral refuge sites in the area.

The authors add: “Now that we have identified an exceptional refuge for Caribbean Staghorn corals, we hope to better determine, in collaboration with reef scientists with many additional interests and expertise, the sources for success at Coral Gardens.”

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The study, recently published in Nature Communications, shows the new technique can also overcome some of the challenges of current testing.

Researchers demonstrated that an AI algorithm could be trained to classify COVID-19 pneumonia in computed tomography (CT) scans with up to 90 percent accuracy, as well as correctly identify positive cases 84 percent of the time and negative cases 93 percent of the time.

CT scans offer a deeper insight into COVID-19 diagnosis and progression as compared to the often-used reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction, or RT-PCR, tests. These tests have high false negative rates, delays in processing and other challenges.

Another benefit to CT scans is that they can detect COVID-19 in people without symptoms, in those who have early symptoms, during the height of the disease and after symptoms resolve.

However, CT is not always recommended as a diagnostic tool for COVID-19 because the disease often looks similar to influenza-associated pneumonias on the scans.

The new UCF co-developed algorithm can overcome this problem by accurately identifying COVID-19 cases, as well as distinguishing them from influenza, thus serving as a great potential aid for physicians, says Ulas Bagci, an assistant professor in UCF’s Department of Computer Science.

Bagci was a co-author of the study and helped lead the research.

“We demonstrated that a deep learning-based AI approach can serve as a standardized and objective tool to assist healthcare systems as well as patients,” Bagci says. “It can be used as a complementary test tool in very specific limited populations, and it can be used rapidly and at large scale in the unfortunate event of a recurrent outbreak.”

Bagci is an expert in developing AI to assist physicians, including using it to detect pancreatic and lung cancers in CT scans.

He also has two large, National Institutes of Health grants exploring these topics, including $2.5 million for using deep learning to examine pancreatic cystic tumors and more than $2 million to study the use of artificial intelligence for lung cancer screening and diagnosis.

To perform the study, the researchers trained a computer algorithm to recognize COVID-19 in lung CT scans of 1,280 multinational patients from China, Japan and Italy.

Then they tested the algorithm on CT scans of 1,337 patients with lung diseases ranging from COVID-19 to cancer and non-COVID pneumonia.

When they compared the computer’s diagnoses with ones confirmed by physicians, they found that the algorithm was extremely proficient in accurately diagnosing COVID-19 pneumonia in the lungs and distinguishing it from other diseases, especially when examining CT scans in the early stages of disease progression.

“We showed that robust AI models can achieve up to 90 percent accuracy in independent test populations, maintain high specificity in non-COVID-19 related pneumonias, and demonstrate sufficient generalizability to unseen patient populations and centers,” Bagci says.

The UCF researcher is a longtime collaborator with study co-authors Baris Turkbey and Bradford J. Wood. Turkbey is an associate research physician at the NIH’s National Cancer Institute Molecular Imaging Branch, and Wood is the director of NIH’s Center for Interventional Oncology and chief of interventional radiology with NIH’s Clinical Center.

This research was supported with funds from the NIH Center for Interventional Oncology and the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health, intramural NIH grants, the NIH Intramural Targeted Anti-COVID-19 program, the National Cancer Institute and NIH.

Bagci received his doctorate in computer science from the University of Nottingham in England and joined UCF’s Department of Computer Science, part of the College of Engineering and Computer Science, in 2015. He is the Science Applications International Corp (SAIC) chair in UCF’s Department of Computer Science and a faculty member of UCF’s Center for Research in Computer Vision. SAIC is a Virginia-based government support and services company.

Maybe not. It turns out that our visual perception is highly adaptable, according to research from Psychology Professor and Cognitive and Brain Sciences Coordinator Peter Gerhardstein’s lab at Binghamton University.

Gerhardstein, Daniel Hipp and Sara Olsen — his former doctoral students — will publish “Mind-Craft: Exploring the Effect of Digital Visual Experience on Changes in Orientation Sensitivity in Visual Contour Perception,” in an upcoming issue of the academic journal Perception. Hipp, the lead author and main originator of the research, is now at the VA Eastern Colorado Health Care System’s Laboratory for Clinical and Translational Research. Olsen, who designed stimuli for the research and aided in the analysis of the results, is now at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Psychiatry.

“The finding in the work is that the human perceptual system rapidly adjusts to a substantive alteration in the statistics of the visual world, which, as we show, is what happens when someone is playing video games,” Gerhardstein said.

The experiments

The research focuses on a basic element of vision: our perception of orientation in the environment.

Take a walk through the Binghamton University Nature Preserve and look around. Stimuli — trees, branches, bushes, the path — are oriented in many different angles. According to an analysis by Hipp, there is a slight predominance of horizontal and then vertical planes — think of the ground and the trees — but no shortage of oblique angles.

Then consider the “carpentered world” of a cityscape — downtown Binghamton, perhaps. The percentage of horizontal and vertical orientations increases dramatically, while the obliques fall away. Buildings, roofs, streets, lampposts: The cityscape is a world of sharp angles, like the corner of a rectangle. The digital world ramps up the predominance of the horizontal and vertical planes, Gerhardstein explained.

Research shows that we tend to pay more attention to horizontal and vertical orientations, at least in the lab; in real-world environments, these differences probably aren’t noticeable, although they likely still drive behavior. Painters, for example, tend to exacerbate these distinctions in their work, a focus of a different research group.

Orientation is a fundamental aspect of how our brain and eyes work together to build the visual world. Interestingly, it’s not fixed; our visual system can adapt to changes swiftly, as the group’s two experiments show.

The first experiment established a method of eye tracking that doesn’t require an overt response, such as touching a screen. The second had college students play four hours of Minecraft — one of the most popular computer games in the world — before and after showing them visual stimuli. Then, researchers determined subjects’ ability to perceive phenomena in the oblique and vertical/horizontal orientations using the eye-tracking method from the first experiment.

A single session produced a clearly detectable change. While the screen-less control group showed no changes in their perception, the game-players detected horizontal and vertical orientations more easily. Neither group changed their perception in oblique orientations.

We still don’t know how temporary these changes are, although Gerhardstein speculates that the vision of the game-playing research subjects likely returned to normal quickly.

“So, the immediate takeaway is the impressive extent to which the young adult visual system can rapidly adapt to changes in the statistics of the visual environment,” he said.

In the next phase of research, Gerhardstein’s lab will track the visual development of two groups of children, one assigned to regularly play video games and the other to avoid screen-time, including television. If the current experiment is any indication, there may be no significant differences, at least when it comes to orientation sensitivity. The pandemic has put in-person testing plans on hold, although researchers have given a survey about children’s playing habits to local parents and will use the results to design a study.

Adaptive vision

Other research groups who have examined the effects of digital exposure on other aspects of visual perception have concluded that long-term changes do take place, at least some of which are seen as helpful.

Helpful? Like other organisms, humans tend to adapt fully to the environment they experience. The first iPhone came out in 2008 and the first iPad in 2010. Children who are around 10 to 12 years old have grown up with these devices, and will live and operate in a digital world as adults, Gerhardstein pointed out.

“Is it adaptive for them to develop a visual system that is highly sensitive to this particular environment? Many would argue that it is,” he said. “I would instead suggest that a highly flexible system that can shift from one perceptual ‘set’ to another rapidly, so that observers are responding appropriately to the statistics of a digital environment while interacting with digital media, and then shifting to respond appropriately to the statistics of a natural scene or a cityscape, would be most adaptive.”

Millipedes and centipedes together comprise the Myriapoda — arthropods with multi-segmented trunks and many legs. Centipedes sport one pair of legs per segment, while millipedes bear two. Despite the apparent numeric implications of their names, different centipede species bear between 30 and 354 legs, and millipedes between 22 and 750. There are about 16,000 species of myriapods, including over 12,000 species of millipedes, but only two myriapod genomes have so far been characterized; a complete genome for the centipede Strigamia maritima, and a rough “draft” sequence of a millipede genome.

The authors of the new study fully sequenced the genomes of two millipede species, the orange rosary millipede Helicorthomorpha holstii, and the rusty millipede Trigoniulus corallinus, from two different orders, each distributed widely throughout the world. They also analyzed the gene transcripts (transcriptomes) at different stages of development, and the proteins (proteomes) of the toxin-producing “ozadene” glands.

The researchers found that two species have genomes of vastly different sizes — the orange rosary’s genome is 182 million base pairs (Mb), while the rusty’s is 449 Mb — which the authors showed was due mainly to the rusty millipede’s genome containing larger non-coding regions (introns) within genes and larger numbers of repetitive “junk” DNA sequences.

Homeobox genes play central roles in body plan formation and segmentation during animal development, and the authors found lineage-specific duplications of common homeobox genes in their two species, which differed as well from those found in the previously published millipede genome. None of the three, however, displayed the massive duplications seen in the homeobox genes in the centipede genome. They made further discoveries about the organization and regulation of the homeobox genes as well.

Many millipedes bear characteristic glands on each segment, called ozadene glands, which synthesize, store, and secrete a variety of toxic and noxious defensive chemicals. The authors identified multiple genes involved in production of these chemicals, including genes for synthesizing cyanide, as well as antibacterial, antifungal, and antiviral compounds, supporting the hypothesis that ozadene gland secretions protect against microbes as well as predators.

The results of this study provide new insights into evolution of the myriapods, and arthropods in general. “The genomic resources we have developed expand the known gene repertoire of myriapods and provide a genetic toolkit for further understanding of their unique adaptations and evolutionary pathways,” Hui said.

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“We found that social media use was rewarding up to a point, as it provided informational, emotional and peer support related to COVID-19 health topics,” said Bu Zhong, associate professor of journalism, Penn State. “However, excessive use of social media led to mental health issues. The results imply that taking a social media break may promote well-being during the pandemic, which is crucial to mitigating mental health harm inflicted by the pandemic.”

The study, which published online on Aug. 15 in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, included 320 participants living in urban districts of Wuhan, China. In February 2020, the team gave the participants an online survey that investigated how they accessed and shared health information with family members, friends and colleagues on social media, specifically WeChat, China’s most popular social media mobile app.

The team used an instrument created to measure Facebook addiction to assess participants’ use of WeChat. Using a 5-point Likert-type scale, ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree, the survey assessed participants’ views of WeChat in providing them with informational, emotional and peer support. The survey also assessed participants’ health behavior changes as a result of using social media.

Statements related to informational support included, “I use WeChat to gain information about how to manage the coronavirus epidemic,” and “If I have a question or need help related to the coronavirus epidemic, I can usually find the answers on WeChat.” Statements related to emotional support included, “My stress levels go down while I’m engaging with others on WeChat,” and “The health information on WeChat helps me alleviate feelings of loneliness.” Statements related to peer support included, “I use WeChat to share practical advice and suggestions about managing the coronavirus epidemic,” and “I have used some of the information I learned from WeChat friends as part of my management strategies for coping with the coronavirus epidemic.”

The survey also investigated participants’ health behavior changes related to the use of WeChat, asking them to rate statements such as, “The health information on WeChat has changed many of my health behaviors, such as but not limited to wearing face masks, using sanitizer, or washing hands.”

To assess depression, the researchers used a 21-item Depression Anxiety Stress Scale in which participants rated statements such as, “I couldn’t seem to experience any positive feeling at all,” and “I felt that life was meaningless.”

According to Zhong, secondary trauma refers to the behaviors and emotions resulting from knowledge about a traumatizing event experienced by a significant other. Using the Secondary Trauma Stress Scale, the researchers asked respondents to rate statements such as, “My heart started pounding when I thought about the coronavirus epidemic,” and “I had disturbing dreams about the coronavirus epidemic.”

“We found that the Wuhan residents obtained tremendous informational and peer support but slightly less emotional support when they accessed and shared health information about COVID-on WeChat,” said Zhong. “The participants also reported a series of health behavior changes, such as increased hand washing and use of face masks.

More than half of the respondents reported some level of depression, with nearly 20% of them suffering moderate or severe depression. Among the respondents who reported secondary trauma, the majority reported a low (80%) level of trauma, while fewer reported moderate (13%) and high (7%) levels of trauma. None of the participants reported having any depressive or traumatic disorders before the survey was conducted.

“Our results show that social media usage was related to both depression and secondary trauma during the early part of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan,” said Zhong. “The findings suggest that taking a social media break from time to time may help to improve people’s mental well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Other authors on the paper include Yakun Huang and Qian Liu of Jinan University.

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